The $1,000 Baby

The $1,000 Baby
[editing in progress]

Moore Junior

With the millenium only a year away* perhaps we need to review just where our technology has taking us. A robot in Japan walks and climbs stairs. Cars drive themselves better then most drivers can manage and don't come to a complete stop whenever their is an accident 10 miles away. Moore's law is still going strong despite the fact that a modern CPU can crank out a billion floating point operation per second.

The code of life has been cracked as well as folded, mutilated, and bent. It's only a matter of time before the child's chemistry set is replaced by the Life Construction Kit (TM) - build your own pet, it's a cat and a dog and it does your homework.

And lets not forget the social progress humans have made. 2% of people now have education past high school, some have a roof that doesnt leak. Females have made gains in the social structure, as long as they dont want to raise children. Most children are born into poverty. A drug war, kids having kids, homocides and crime - and that's the 1st world countries. And the most educated and productive humans aren't having children, the ones with hereditary genetic defects are. Wait... sorry, no real social or biological progress to report, we're still hitting each other with clubs and need alchohol to reproduce.

And Baby makes 10^3

With the millenium baby on the way, perhaps it's time to notice a far more significant event.

The first baby born that can be replaced at any time their entire life with $1,000 of technology no matter how intelligent/strong/cute they are - the $1,000 baby.

Lets name this baby Kilo - the metric prefix for 1000. And we'll name our $1,000 computer gizmo Kire - for "Kilo's Replacement". And the year this baby is born will be 0 A.K - After Kilo (or Kire).

For the first several years of Kilo's life all they can do is eat, sleep, ask questions, and break things. Lets assume this runs up to about 6 A.K., when formal education begins. This gives robotics and computers 6 years from the birth of Kilo to gain vision, movement, voice generation and understanding, and a basic understanding of the world around them. This point if not already reached will be here well before 6 years from now - doesn't look good for our buiological friend.

6-12 A.K. - In the "advanced" parts of the world humans are generally only involved in education and play. This give's us 6 more years to train Kire and advance it's computational and reasoning powers. It walks it talks and can answer questions and do simple tasks, and so can Kilo. If Moore's law keeps up, a CPU will have at least 2^12 times more power then when Kilo is born. Again, no problem for Kire, not looking good for Kilo.

12-18 A.K. - Things get interesting. During this time education continues for both Kilo and Kire, but trainable unskilled or semi-skilled labor starts to be expected or both. Around the age of 12 most hunans gain the ability of abstract thought - the (only) thing that seperates them from dolphins, apes, and other intelligent species. Kire can perform any job most 18yr old humans can, "would you like fries with that" is easy enough. Kire works for about 3 years, 24 hours a day before a replacement 8 times as good or 8 times cheaper is needed. Human wages drop to about $0.20 a day for semiskilled labor to compete with machines.

By year 18 A.K, a computer with the approximate computational power of a human brain is expected to exist. The question is how well the computer can use that computational power. 18+ A.K. for those humans not going on to more education (available in many forms by this time) the game is long over. For those humans going onto an advanced education, they may have a few more years to go. Kire will need advanced reasoning and abstraction abilities to replace the last 1% of humans. This is where Kilo may still have skills that Kire cannot yet match.

20 A.K. - 7.5 Gigahumans born to... consume space

So what is in store for this $1,000 baby, and the human race after Kilo turns 18, 25, or 30?

For many humans this $1,000 point is long past today. Anyone without enough food to eat or somewhere to live can easily be replaced by old broken robots today. Humans that's cannot read but can work can be replaced by working robots. This is over 50% of todays world population.

Lets revisit our profound social progress. How will obsolete humans react to being less intelligent then their PC, and a year later, less intelligent then their PDA, and a year later, their wristwatch. Same thing humans have done since the dawn of time - they will hit it with a club.

Ignorance is bliss

The enemy is not Kire, the enemy is us. Kire will far surpass us in every way, but will be built by us. It will understand us as the scared club wielding apes we are, and all the other ways that we are afraid to admit. Kire will either assist humanity, or ignore it completely.

Kire will think fast, very fast. Would you talk to someone that can only say one word every week? That is how Kire will percieve us. Humans at best can type a few words per second, but to Kira will be able to read millions of words per second. Why listen when you could read everything ever written in the time a human can write a simple essay, and figure it out yourself?

Beam me up Scotty

While Kire will run off and continue to evole away from things that talk slow and want to hit it with clubs, the early versions of Kire will be able to do anything that 99% of humans can. So what do those humans do? They dont have to work to live, and can't handle many useful things unless they are genericly and technologicly from birth.

There is some evidence this leasure lifestyle and low need to work type of society has existed before. Unfortunately it always ended very badly, the great societies of the past all fell apart and reverted to primative forms. The pyramids of the egyptians, the stonework of the Aztecs, the circles of stonehenge - we still can't figure out how they did any of that. Some very advanced civilization was on 3 continents 12,500 years ago. This leaves two options, the nice one being aliens helped and we are as smart as ever, the other is that there were very smart people in the past, and someone came along and hit the smart ones with a club.

Human society will self-destruct eventually, unless we reengineer our gene pool so we can all just get along. This is unlikely to say the least, and even if we started now, everyone else that is already born would be a huge problem.

0 A.K. = ?

We are clearly past the 50% mark, when we hit 100% Kilo will be born. Is that day today? Probably not today, but soon.

* - Oddly enough it is one of many collapses in civilization that made western civilization forget the concept of zero yet again, which caused the monks to screw up the calendar.

- Adam L. Beberg, Dec 28, 1999